Top of the list right now is a 7″ square format from Blurb like this one, which can be made available in softcover and hardback with a loose cover.

In the meantime, thought you might like to see the photographs chosen in the first edit. Some of them will be 2 or 4 to a page, so will be seen rather small, and they won’t all make the final cut. Good job, really.

Will post again to let you know what they’re like when the copies arrive.

This video of Philip Toledano’s workspace from Hetherington reminded me to take some newer pictures of my own working space, since it is always so interesting to see how other people work. Anyone like to show me theirs? This next one’s Lomas down the Ouseburn in Newcastle.

And a superbly minimalist approach from Volker Gerling to print sales in the form of flip books from cinema-attendant trays, most likely found over at the Mrs Deane blog. So that would be two or possibly three more to add to your RSS Reader, if they’re not already there.

Jon Bounds produces, amongst many other internetty things, the mighty Birmingham Is Not Shit website. It’s a superb collection of the weird, not so weird and the wonderful that is probably the UK’s most decried and warmly loved big city. It’s definitely one for your feed reader, even if you’ve never been.

So, today when the story above popped up, it looked like something I would know about, or have heard about. Indeed it would seem strange if I hadn’t known. Rooftop gigs like this had happened before, they’d been all the rage. But after much puzzling, it was pretty clear that I didn’t know. Not exactly.

A minute or two on Google found Breakthru and Dickie, the lad there in the hat playing the drums, sent me this photograph, along with the scan of a newspaper article about it all. See that skinny young thing with the cropped hair staring up in amazement? That could so easily have been me. It isn’t, but still..

A few of us had scratched our heads earlier in the day trying to work out exactly where this had all happened. Dickie added his red arrow to the map, and suddenly it all fell into place.

Dickie was about 18 or 19 when the photo was taken. It was an exciting time in the city, lots going on, lots and lots to see and do. Fourty (40) pages of jobs in Thursday’s Evening Mail every week, and a sense of style and optimism that you could touch and feel. Thanks Jon, and good to meet you, Dickie. The archive album by Breakthru only came out about a year or so ago on a specialist 60s label called Circle and is available here.

Never, never throw away your old photographs.…

So, who took the pictures?

Oh, quite co-incidentally:

Ed Horwich’s videos from the weekend are now online. Here, Ian Macmillan relishes the role of northern bloke as buffoon, with allusions to pubs and fights and bums and rugby. Reminds me how very blokey is photography as a job, or perhaps used to be. Persevere through the rich south Yorks accent, and let me know what you think.

Two of Ed’s eight videos are interviews with women. Catriona Buckett, putting together her final MA show in the medieval Chethams Library and below, Louise Clements, curator of Quad and the mighty Format Festival in Derby.

There’s more stuff coming onto the interweb daily from the Symposium, including more video clips and sound files. Mostly they’ll be tagged with NPR1 and at some point they’ll surely all be assembled on the Redeye website.

Ed Horwich runs Shot Up North, the SUN Awards. There are very few days left to enter, but there’s still time if you’ve got the work. See if you can spot Rob Birrell’s telephone box photo in last year’s book.

Most recent live tweets from Symposium-goers are (temporarily) over there on the right. Even if you don’t get Twitter, you can subscribe in your own reader to see when people publish, and there’ll be more here on NPS1 as further thoughts fall into place, and definitely more on Saddleworth Moor, where I stayed. It was an interesting couple of days.

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away.

There will doubtless be more moving tributes in the coming days and weeks, and I’ll add them in. Terrible news. The day they stop processing it can’t be far away. I have two rolls. Two.

Article from the newly blogging Andy Moseley, and the full announcement from Kodak is here.

Blip FM for more versions of the Paul Simon Song, and here’s the magnificent Shorpy’s Gallery of 5×4 Kodachromes.

Butlins, Filey, 1963 was our first actual English proper family holiday. Bickering everywhere you looked, soggy food, bossy chilcare, grubby ‘chalets’. Oh dear. We never went again, anyway. We’d been abroad, on aeroplanes, though not on holidays. Troop shipments, we were.

There may have been a hint of optimism in that grin. He was coming out of the Army, after a series of worst nightmare postings, starting with Korea in 1952, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, through Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald and then the engineered civil war in Cyprus.

He’d always taken photographs, throughout all that miasma of chaos and devastation. Didn’t particularly like it when the camera was pointed at him, except when it was handed to my somewhat reluctant mother.

That top one’s probably shot on 127 film, a small bakelite Kodak Brownie, as I recall. He’s holding his treasured Super 8 wind-up cine. Still works to this day although I haven’t been able to face putting a film through it.

This second photo is by the Butlins staffer, taking people completely by surprise, flashes pinging off but really not expecting him to do us, and then realising he was doing everybody. Ah yes, half a crown per print. A lot of money in those days, although doubtless he didn’t get to keep it all himself.

One of this morning’s earliest tweets was from a Photography Symposium-goer whose Father’s Day treat had been breakfast in bed, and on they continued to flow, all day. Men, warmly loved and appreciated by their children, and evidently thrilled with little presents, cuddles, smiles, cards.

I think it was Bea Campbell who said that our birth decade’s fathers, psyches blighted by barely imaginable horrors of war, really weren’t up to the job, and that it would take us several generations to find men capable of more humane and tender parenting than we’d enjoyed. Well, maybe it’s happening sooner than we dared to hope.

Happy Father’s Day, all you generous, beloved, new wave dads. Enjoy!

So, why the prolongued hiatus, huh? It’s all too diverting to blame busy, or ennui. Instead, this is my personal list of what not to blog:

1. Rantings
Cross, grumpy, or even just grumbly. About the state of the industry. Wah! 7,000 photography students graduating, and they all have a camera, and point them at stuff!

2. Gearhead
The latest kit. Detailed descriptions of black plastic functionality VS dark grey plastic functionality. Thirds, primes, Amaxon links. Prices and price comparisons.

3. Gripes
How crap people are who do 1 and/or 2.

4. Copywrong
Bleat whine groan whimper someone stole my photo wot I put on the internet.

5. Direct whack
Them over there is rubbish.

6. Direct whack rencontrer
On the other hand, my pictures is really great.

7. Pointing
This has already been posted by 43 others in a round hall of mirrors, all the same, but I know you will like it.

8. Slander
You utter f*ckwit, tinpot dicator, creep.

… and so forth and so on.

Great things to blog?

Progress. Things that are better. More loved, more appreciated. Times that have been seen, pictures in the mind, realised. Echoes. Places that were, places that are. People, real and imagined. Secrets, secret places. Change, more change, and those things that remain the same…

In a tutorial, once, a long time ago, I said that a photograph gives permission to stare. That the best photographs give us all permission to stare. And to be stared back at, scrutinised in turn. But maybe that’s just my biography.

Photos tomorrow.

Of course it’s black and white film they’re making. See those bars of pure silver being loaded into the kiln? And the cows? That’s the gelatin part. Silver gelatin film.

Click through any of the above to watch the whole thing.

There’s a network involving maybe 60 or 70 artists from a wide variety of disciplines based in East Durham, running projects, workshops and exhibitions all over the County. Barrie West, an abstract painter, has made this drop box, inviting other people in the network to post anything, as he says, that Wows them. He had quite a collection the other day. The idea is to use these Wows to build art, either as an influence or set of influences, or as a sort of collective biography.

If you’d like to offer up a Wow or two in the comments below, I’m pretty sure he’ll see them at some point or when he Googles his name. Mine were mailed to him today. They are:

1. The enthusiasms of Shirley Anne Wood
2. This morning’s glittering sunrise sky
3. The chords in O Fortuna from Carmina Burana

4. Twitter – I’m really enjoying it. Honestly.
5. When my son phoned me back and sounded happy. Wonderful.
6. Runny brie and fresh crusty bread, with a crisp English orchard apple.
7. The magic of seeing a print emerge from the developer.

Now, your turn…..